Packed with tales of murder, suicide, and revenge, the seventh album from Icelandic metal cowboys Sólstafir is what you might call the opposite of sunny. “It’s a really dark album,” drummer and vocalist Hallgrímur Jón “Grimsi” Hallgrímsson tells Apple Music. “It’s more rock-focused than the last album, and the mood is a bit heavier.” Endless Twilight of Codependent Love marks just the second time Sólstafir has titled an album in English, but don’t let that fool you: All the songs except one—the single “Her Fall From Grace”—feature Icelandic lyrics. “It’s almost like the opposite of Köld,” says Grimsi, referring to the band’s 2009 album. “That one has an Icelandic title with only English lyrics on it.” Below, he takes us through each track. Akkeri “The title means ‘Anchor.’ It’s a schizophrenic song, but it was supposed to be like that. We just went in different directions and we connected it as smoothly as we could. The beginning is really raw and earthy and ambient, and it's a bit like a buildup in a story. Then we put the power in the next chapter. Then there’s a bit of a tribute to old-school Sólstafir, and then a bit of ’70s Kiss and Thin Lizzy. So this is all stuff we really like. But when we have these long songs, we never want people to get bored. So we try to make it long and interesting.” Drýsill “This means ‘Demon,’ and the storyline in this song was basically inspired by that show Succession, which has really ethically fucked-up people. The main character in the lyrics is a narcissist—the kind of guy who has a lot of money, has a really good job, a really big place—who hooks up with a girl and beats her and locks her down in the cellar. It’s a lot of domestic violence. In the end, she is finally able to kill him. But I think maybe the meaning of the song is when you’re trapped in your own dark mind and in the end you’re able to [get out].” Rökkur “‘Rökkur’ is basically ‘Twilight.’ [Guitarist] Sæþór [Maríus Sæþórsson] basically came to rehearsal with a demo he did for this song, and instantly we fell in love with it. It was basically a whole song he did, so we put some dark, disgusting lyrics on it and it was finished. It’s another song about a guy who is treating a woman very bad and the woman gets revenge and kills the guy. But this one is inspired by a real story, about a guy who was a professor or something. He would go to the bars at weekends and spike the drinks of girls and take them home. One of these girls contacts some gangsters who help her cut his dick off and then they drive to the country and put him in the river.” Her Fall From Grace “This is about a really nice country girl who loves nature and rides horses and likes to do illustrations. She’s really good and people think she’s going to make it, but she moves to the city and starts hanging out with people who are a bad influence, and in the end, she goes the same way. When we were rehearsing the song and we didn’t have lyrics, [vocalist/guitarist] Addi just started to sing in English. It fit so well that we decided to keep it that way. We didn’t want to push it to be in Icelandic.” Dionysus “With this one, the first thing we thought about was an old-school black metal thing. And then we put it together with this other part that we were maybe going to use for another song, but it fit perfectly here. I think Addi did the vocals in one take. I was in the studio watching him, and this song just did something to him. One take and that was that. I was thinking this one should be the first song on the record, but that kind of stuff is always such a hard decision.” Til Moldar “‘Til Moldar’ means when people are at a funeral and you’re laying the casket into the ground. It’s basically about a guy who is committing suicide. And when he’s dying, he can see all the things he didn’t see before. So it’s sad. He’s dying and the world is showing him what he’s missing and what could have been. It’s a very depressing song.” Alda Syndanna “This means ‘The Wave of Your Sins.’ It’s about the demon on your shoulder who is always trying to control you and make you make the bad decision. And then you make the bad decision and regret it and it becomes this loop of depression.” Or “In Icelandic, it means ‘Scar.’ This is a song that wasn’t supposed to go on the album. We had this blues thing going on, and we thought we’d make this song a B-side. But then we added another part and thought it was too cool to not have it on the album. It’s also funny because I did the drums without any backing track or anything. I was alone in the studio and just had the song in my head.” Úlfur “I thought this first riff sounds a bit like Deftones, but we weren’t trying to go that way at all. All of us really like Deftones, but we were thinking about another thing. The title means ‘Wolf,’ in this case the lone she-wolf. The lyric is about a woman who is married to a guy who is a diplomat, and they are moving a lot around the world and they go to a lot of fancy parties and stuff. But this guy is cheating with a lot of other women, and the wife is always alone. One winter, she drinks a whole bottle of vodka and walks into the countryside in the snow and sits down and dies, basically. I guess there are a lot of evil guys on this record, but it’s something we just realized afterwards.”